


february flowers

by shirohyasha



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Gen, M/M, Timeskip Era, hanahaki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-19 01:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15499131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirohyasha/pseuds/shirohyasha
Summary: Naruto starts throwing up petals eight months into his trip with Jiraiya.





	february flowers

**Author's Note:**

> additional warnings at the end

Naruto starts throwing up petals eight months into his trip with Jiraiya.

They’re in Suna. They’re in Suna and Naruto is hanging out with Gaara and one moment Gaara is asking after Sakura’s health and the next moment Naruto is coughing up what he thinks is going to be sick but is instead a small, colourless petal.

Gaara turns pale. Naruto stares blankly at the petal in his hand until his eyes start to water, and then he turns to look at Gaara with such bemusement on his face that it might be funny in another situation.

It might have been funny, if Naruto hadn’t just coughed up a death sentence.

They go and find Jiraiya. Well, Naruto does, and he drags Gaara with him. “I don’t know what’s happening!” Naruto is panicking. “You have to come too! You saw what happened!”

What had happened is that they’d realised Naruto has hanahaki. What had happened is that they’d realised Naruto was going to _die._

They find Jiraiya being thrown from a bathhouse. Really, the man was disgusting. Naruto wondered why Tsunade hadn’t beaten it out of him yet – if he’d had any gross thoughts like that, Sakura probably would have killed him.

Sakura sends him letters sometimes, with the summoning jutsu that she’s made Tsuande teach her. She’s become a lot scarier in the past nine months than she had in all the time they’d trained together as genin. Naruto thinks he likes her better this way.

Naruto holds out his hand to Jiraiya with the damp petal on it and Jiraiya stares at him until he realises what it means.

Jiraiya presses his lips together and turns to Gaara, asks where they might have a conversation about all of this without being overheard.

Naruto follows obediently until they reach somewhere safe and Jiraiya turns on them. “What happened?” he says. His face is grim.

Naruto tells him as best he can. “Gaara asked how Sakura was, and I said that she was doing much better,” he says. “Then I threw it up.”

“That’s not what you said,” Gaara says. “You said that she was stronger now. Then you said that she seems to be doing better than she has since the Uchiha left. And then you coughed up the petal.”

Gaara says _the Uchiha_ the way one might say _the_ _angry snake._ Delicately. With little fondness.

Jiraiya turns to him. “So which one is it?” he asks. “Is it Sakura, or the Uchiha?”

Naruto doesn’t even violently recoil and yell at the thought of him being heartbroken over Sasuke, because from the moment the thought is put into his head, it makes a disturbing amount of sense. He’s obsessed with Sasuke, he’s always been obsessed with Sasuke, and Sasuke leaving broke his heart.

Jiraiya presses his lips together when Naruto doesn’t answer. “It would have been easier if it was Sakura,” he says, like it’s Naruto’s own fault he fell in love with a traitor.

It isn’t. Naruto feels ill. Jiraiya summons a toad and scribbles out a letter on a piece of torn notebook paper, and shoves it at the frog. “Tsunade. Now. Wait for her reply.”

The frog vanishes. Naruto stares blindly at the blurry petal in his blurry hand.

Jiraiya turns to Gaara. “Sorry, Kazekage-sama, but I can’t let you out of my sight until we know exactly what our Hokage’s orders are.”

“I understand,” Gaara says, looking more worried than irritated. “I need to inform my siblings that I will be temporarily indisposed.”

Neither of them say it, and Naruto probably hasn’t realised it yet, but a jinchuuriki getting sick was probably something Gaara wanted to know about. Until about five minutes ago, no one had thought it was even possible.

 

Tsunade orders the two of them back to Konoha. Jiraiya considers Gaara for a long moment until he shrugs, eventually defeated. “If you let it get out that jinchuuriki got sick, who knows what’ll happen to you,” he warns. “No offence intended, Kazekage-sama.”

Gaara smiles blandly. “No offence will be taken at your poor attempt of a threat. Naruto is a friend of mine. I will not inform my people.”

Jiraiya bows, and Naruto barges through to hug Gaara goodbye, and then they go back to Konoha through the horrible, horrible desert.

And then Tsunade beats the hell out of both of them, and then Sakura beats the hell out of him.

Mostly, Tsunade is just pissed off that she didn’t manage to find the roots growing in his lungs all those months ago, when Naruto had been in the hospital after meeting Sasuke at the Valley of the End.

“We,” Sakura tells him after Tsunade’s done examining him. “We’re going to kill him, if he comes back. We won’t make you do it.”

Naruto guesses she’s probably talking about the rest of the Konoha twelve. He’s kind of mad they didn’t ask his opinion.

“I don’t think we have to kill him, Sakura,” Naruto says. He doesn’t sound as sure as he usually does. “I think we just have to make sure that he comes home.”

Sakura starts crying. Then she drags him to a training ground and beats the life out of him until her tears stop.

 

The long and short of it is that he has a few years left to live. Three or four. If he can get stronger and talk the nine-tails into helping him survive, he might live a little longer. If he can bring back Sasuke and confess, and that somehow works out, he’ll be cured. If he gets over his feelings, he’ll be cured.

“That’s rare, though,” Tsunade tells him. “It’s very, very rare. If the feelings are strong enough for the disease to actually take root, they don’t tend to fade out over time.”

Naruto hates hearing people talk about his _feelings_ for Sasuke. A lot of it is because Sasuke is a bastard and a traitor and he broke Sakura’s heart and ran off to join another traitor. Another part of it is that he doesn’t even feel like he’s in love with Sasuke, not really.

He lets Tsunade finish telling him things and goes to send a message to Gaara. He doesn’t have any useful information, so it’s a short letter, but he thinks Gaara will want to know what Tsunade has deduced about jinchuuriki illnesses. Which is precious little, but who knows what could be important? Naruto certainly doesn’t.

He wants to complain about all of this to someone who can explain it to him, but Tsunade and Jiraiya have decided that the only people who are allowed to know are themselves, Gaara, Sakura, and Kakashi when he gets back from. Wherever. So he goes to Sakura and flings himself onto the chair next to hers where she’s reading an enormous medical tome.

“I think I must be in love with you,” he tells her. They’re alone, which is good because this conversation is going to be embarrassing. Really embarrassing. “Because I still feel the same about you and Sasuke as I always have, so it doesn’t make sense for me to be in love with Sasuke.”

Sakura closes her book. Naruto recognises it – he’s read it. Parts of it. The parts he could understand. “Hanahaki is an exclusively romantic disease. People who don’t form romantic attachments are immune to it,” Sakura tells him. “I haven’t broken your heart or rejected you, and you only liked me because Sasuke didn’t.”

“That’s not true!” Naruto protests, though he thinks it might be. Sakura sees through him.

“If you don’t think you’re in love with Sasuke, what do you think of him?” she asks.

“He’s a bastard,” Naruto says. “He’s a bastard and a traitor and I’m going to beat his head in until he realises this and drag him back to Konoha by his stupid hair.”

“And after that?” Sakura asks. “What are you going to do when Sasuke is in Konoha?”

“Become Hokage,” Naruto declares proudly. “And make it such an awesome place that no one ever wants to defect again.”

Sakura pinches the bridge of her nose. “And where do Sasuke and I fit into all of this?”

“You’re probably going to be in charge of all the medics, and Sasuke,” Naruto stops, uncertain for the first time. “I’m not sure where Sasuke will be,” he eventually says.

Sakura picks up her book and lets him think about it. Naruto always gets the right answer eventually. It just might take him some time.

Naruto gets bored after ten minutes and tells her he’s going to go train with whoever he can find. Sakura waves him off and tells him to think about it.

 

He’s still trying to figure it out later, when he’s in bed in the tiny shitty apartment that’s somehow still in his name. He stares at the ceiling until he’s seeing strange shapes in the darkness and wonders and wonders about Sasuke. Sasuke, who he’s taken fatal blows for and who has taken fatal blows for him. Who dropped his child’s forehead protector, scratched and symbolic, onto Naruto’s chest when he left him alive in the Valley of the End.

Sasuke is a bastard, yes, but Naruto’s always done his best when he’s training alongside him, when they’re needling at each other with barbs that could very easily hurt but don’t. And he’s missed him, for all the time that he’s been gone. Naruto has missed Sasuke and the life that they’d sort of shared together as a genin team with Sakura and Kakashi and everyone else in Konoha who’s as weird and awesome as they one day could be.

Naruto wants Sasuke to come home. He wants him back.

 

Sakura finds him in the morning, drowning in petals. She had thought to drag him out for breakfast, so he didn’t just eat ramen, but instead drags him to Tsunade and tells her what had happened.

Tsunade examines him again. Naruto barely grumbles at the poking and prodding that she subjects him to, and when she tells him to put his shirt on again she doesn’t sound as worried as she could.

“Well, I’d suggest not thinking about whatever you thought about last night,” she says brightly. Too brightly. “But in a way, the coughing fit was almost a good thing. Your lungs are almost empty of petals right now. There are just roots in there.”

Sakura shoots him a worried glance. Naruto smiles back as best he can. “I was thinking about trying to bring Sasuke back,” he says. “Isn’t that what I need to do?”

“That’s one option,” Tsunade says. “There is another.”

Naruto knows what the other option is.

 

When he had been a kid, the woman who lived three stories above him had contracted hanahaki. Naruto had only noticed because the only thing he had to do was pull pranks, and one day when he was hiding snakes in her apartment she had thrown up a cascade of petals.

He had released the snakes into the forest and sat on his (tiny, lumpy, even back then) bed for hours and stared at the covers.

She had scowled at him in the market the next day when she spotted him looking at her. There was no way she knew he knew she was sick but he did, and instead of pulling a face at her he had looked away and left.

Three months later she had died. Naruto wondered if anyone else had known she’d had hanahaki while she’d still been alive. Her lungs had been full of flowers when she’d died and he’d visited her grave after dark, when her family and friends had long since left.

She’d been weak at the end. She hadn’t gone to the market and she hadn’t had guests, and Naruto hadn’t been sure what he should do.

“You’re sick,” he’d said.

The woman stood in her doorway and scowled down at him. He didn’t know her name and she didn’t offer it to him. “Mind your own business.”

“You should see a doctor!” he’d cried, jamming his foot in her door. “You’re sick!”

She glared at him. “Nosy bastard,” she’d snarled. “I’d have to be a lot worse off than this to want your help.”

Naruto had flinched back and she’d slammed the door. He didn’t know a lot but he did know that hanahaki was fatal. This woman was dying.

He slunk back to his room and let her die.

 

“Surgery,” he says. Tsunade blinks at him as though she hadn’t expected him to. “I know what the side effects are. I don’t – I don’t want those.”

“Naruto,” Sakura says, though she’s already resigned. He can hear it. “You shouldn’t suffer over this. It’s not your fault and you don’t deserve to die for S – because Uchiha left the village.”

“I want you to come with me,” Tsunade says. She doesn’t sound defeated like Sakura. “I want you to come with me and listen before you tell me you’re not getting the surgery, and I want you to think about it very, very carefully.”

Naruto nods. Tsunade is _pissed_.

She takes him to the hospital. To the hanahaki ward.

The ward smells overwhelmingly of flowers. It’s a hot day and the windows are open, and the flowers growing on the vines that are sprouting out of these peoples’ mouths are in full bloom.

They’re beautiful. They’re hideous.

Naruto gasps, horrified, when he follows Sakura and Tsunade inside. They look around with weary expressions. They’ve seen enough of this place.

The woman closest to the door has tiny jasmine flowers blossoming from her mouth. The vines are a cheerful green, bright and thin, and they almost drown the hospital bed. It’s not until Naruto steps really close that he can see the green lights of a healing jutsu over her nose and mouth, probably keeping her alive the best they can.

“It’s too late for these people,” Sakura says suddenly, cutting the silence harshly. “The roots are too ingrown. They’d die if they were removed.”

“They’re going to die anyway,” Tsunade says. “No one in here has more than a month left to live.”

The person on the opposite bed to the jasmine lady has huge, brilliant yellow-red flowers growing from the vines coming from their mouth and nose. They’re not quite swamping the bed yet, but they curl over their throat onto their chest, over the pillows.

Sakura marches over to him and glares at him with watery eyes. “Don’t you dare die for him,” she says. “Don’t you dare die to keep a stupid promise.”

Naruto would survive the operation required to remove the plants from his lungs. He probably knows more about it than his medics realise and he knows he would survive it.

(He’d gone to the library, after his neighbour’s death.)

But. But Sasuke doesn’t deserve to be abandoned. Not his best friend, not his first friend. Everyone else in Konoha has all but written him off as too far gone, too obsessed with revenge and unwilling to be saved.

Naruto wants Sasuke to come home. He wants him to come home so badly it aches, and then he realises it’s a physical ache and that he’s coughing again. Small colourless blossoms tumble to the floor and Tsunade is suddenly there, hands lit up against his throat. It hurts less then, and the two of them let him cough himself out.

“I want him to come home,” Naruto says, and it comes out a lot smaller and more broken and more pathetic than he wants to feel. “No, he’s going to come home. I’m going to march into Oto and kill Orochimaru by myself if I have to, and then I’m going to bring Sasuke home.”

Tsunade and Sakura exchange a look over his head, one he can’t see. Tsunade sighs. “If you want to kill Orochimaru, Jiraiya is going to need to up your training.”

 

So be it.

 

Jiraiya wakes him up the next day with a noticeable black eye and a shuriken to the space his head was half a second before. “Jiraiya!” Naruto yelps, clutching his blankets like a shield. “What are you doing?”

“It’s time for training,” Jiraiya says grimly. Naruto’s heart sinks. The sun is barely up.

First, Jiraiya has him warm up. He runs fifty laps around Konoha and stretches until he can fold himself entirely in half, and then Jiraiya beats the hell out of him using taijutsu. He’s nowhere near as good as the best, but that’s not important because he’s significantly better than Naruto.

“No good,” he says, after Naruto lands on his ass again. “Train with Lee. Or Sakura. Maito Gai. I don’t care – I’m not the best to learn this from and you may as well take advantage of being in Konoha.”

Jiraiya doesn’t like being in one place for too long. Naruto had got used to wandering as well, but being in Konoha makes Jiraiya cranky and impatient.

They eat breakfast. Jiraiya tells him Tsunade might let them travel if Naruto doesn’t get any worse over the next couple of weeks.

The sun has been up for a while now, but it’s the middle of summer and only now is the village coming alive. Jiraiya drags Naruto to the library and spends the next two hours drilling tactics and strategy into his head. Then they spar again, this time with ninjutsu allowed as well. Jiraiya wipes the floor even more thoroughly with Naruto’s ass then, but he doesn’t seem as interested as pawning this training off onto someone else.

Then they have lunch – Naruto has never been this hungry in his life, and that’s a depressingly impressive feat – and spend the afternoon trying to hone the Rasengan.

Well, they spend a couple of hours doing that, and then Jiraiya remembers that he hasn’t taught Naruto about chakra types yet, so they sit down and do that.

Naruto doesn’t really get it, and Jiraiya decides that this is something he’s definitely going to be making Kakashi teach the moment he drags his ass back from whatever mission he’s on.

They do their best to get Naruto to remember some of the theory, and then Jiraiya tells him to take a couple of hours off.

Jiraiya drags him out to the forest once he’s done with dinner and tells him to practice the basics until he’s told to stop. Naruto decides to play exploding tag with himself, which isn’t as fun as exploding tag with other people, but it does help him practice the basics.

He spends what feels like hours scuttling around the trees, never once touching the floor, and by the time Jiraiya returns the sun is almost down and he’s considering just falling asleep and letting the forest animals take him. He’s pretty sure he’s on the far side of the forest of death here, so whatever gets him will at least make it quick.

Naruto goes home, showers in about thiry seconds flat, and is asleep in less time than that once he gets into bed.

Rinse and repeat.

 

On the fourth day of this nightmarish regimen, Kakashi returns from whatever shitty mission they had him on and looks absolutely stricken at the news.

Kakashi had moped for days when Sasuke left. Then he’d thrown himself back into taking missions once it became apparent that Sakura and Naruto were going to be training elsewhere.

“You want me to do what?” Kakashi asks. “Why can’t you teach him about chakra? He’s your apprentice.”

Kakashi gets an order from the Hokage to teach Naruto and Sakura about elemental chakra. Sakura has a water affinity, and Naruto has one for wind.

“Not very flashy,” he grumbles, but Kakashi cuffs his head in reprimand.

“Wind is fairly suited to fighting. Water tends to be better suited for healing, so congratulations to both of you!” Kakashi claps his hands together cheerfully in a way that means he’s plotting imminent torture for both of them. “Now, let’s train.”

It is exactly as awful as they’d expected. The two of them drag themselves to the barbeque stand afterwards in such a state of exhaustion that they can barely stay upright to eat. Kakashi, naturally, insists on coming, not at all looking like he could have flattened Konoha if he’d been aiming in the right direction.

“Show off,” Naruto mumbles. Sakura nods.

 

Naruto goes through this whole routine for two weeks until Tsunade decides that his condition is stable enough – and Jiraiya is unstable enough – that letting them travel won’t cause too many problems. Naruto knows how to train with his chakra type now, and Jiraiya has had his ear chewed off enough by Tsunade about wasting time that he’s never going to let Naruto slack off now.

Naruto tackles Kakashi with a hug before he leaves and promises to send weekly reports that he knows Kakashi is only pretending not to want. He hugs Sakura and Tsunade goodbye, says goodbye to everyone else in the village, who still don’t know that he’s sick, and then the two of them leave Konoha for the next three months.

“Three months,” Tsunade says. “That’s an order. You’re back here in three months for a check-up or I will hunt you down and make you regret not coming.”

“Bye, Tsunade!” Naruto waves at her. “See you soon!”

She smiles at him. “Stay safe,” she tells them both. And then they’re gone from Konoha, gone until Tsunade summons them back, gone until Naruto gets worse.

 

Outside of Konoha, training is a little different. Naruto still spends hours every day getting beaten up by Jiraiya, but there’s less focus on battle tactics and more focus on speed and stealth. Naruto’s Rasengan grows bigger and bigger and then smaller again, dense and heavy, enough destructive force held in the palm of his hand to punch straight through he toughened flak jackets that most shinobi wear. And then through their chests, and out the other side.

It’s a bit of a nauseating thought, punching a hole in someone’s chest. _Burning_ a hole through someone; the Rasengan is hot in his hand, skimming the surface of his palm. He conjures them up one after the other and lets them dissipate, the chakra in them flowing back into his body.

Sometimes Jiraiya will have him practise stealth while they travel – Naruto has to stay within a hundred metres but undetected by Jiraiya. It’s far harder than it looks, and before the end of the day Naruto is absolutely covered in brightly coloured powder from exploding shuriken that Jiraiya tosses at him when he hears him.

And there’s more, each training method more bizarre than the last. Jiraiya teaches him to summon the toads. Kakashi sends a letter asking about the specifics of his shadow clones. Sakura tells him she’s officially a chuunin now, and has been given more responsibilities in the hospital.

Naruto’s fifteenth birthday passes. He dreams about going home to celebrate and wakes up coughing violently when dream-Naruto had realised that Sasuke hadn’t come to the party.

More petals come up than have since he left Konoha and Jiraiya scowls. “I don’t like taking you back to Konoha,” he mutters. “You have too many memories of the Uchiha there.”

He’s not wrong. Every place in Konoha seems to have Sasuke imprinted on it but Naruto grins cheekily anyway. “You have to tell old lady Tsunade we’re not coming back!” he tells Jiraiya. Jiraiya shudders.

“Never mind,” he says. “We’re heading back there for next week.”

They cross Stone Country and soon enough they’re travelling through the huge Konoha redwoods. Naruto missed this landscape. He does so much better at the exploding-paint-shuriken games in trees than he does when they’re travelling through craggy, soulless rocks.

The huge monument to the Hokages appears in the far distance, only visible from the very top of the trees, and Naruto whoops when he sees it, delighted to be home.

Tsunade is waiting for him when he gets there – they’d sensed him miles out and he has to work on his shielding, but for now she’s content to poke and prod him and run diagnostic tests that make her face get slowly grimmer and grimmer.

“It’s progressing at a fairly average rate,” Tsunade tells him. “You’d still survive the surgery, and you’ve got a bit over two years before you won’t.”

Naruto beams at her. “It’s going to be sorted way before that! Jiraiya has some intel on Orochimaru and we’ll track them once we leave Konoha.”

Tsunade frowns. “I don’t need to remind you that Orochimaru is an S-class missing nin, do I?” And then she beats him out of her window.

Sakura has just finished her shift at the when he meets her. “Yo,” she says, and suddenly it’s like she’s not the girl Naruto thought he was hopelessly in love with at all.

But she’s still Sakura and Naruto still loves her, so they go and get ramen and catch up face to face in a way that letters sometimes don’t allow them to.

“You’ve changed, Sakura,” Naruto eventually mumbles, when he’s eaten four bowls and can barely hold his head up. They’re in Sakura’s parents’ house now, which is far far nicer than Naruto’s apartment and a place Sakura is thinking about leaving. “Being away from me and Sasuke was good for you.”

Sakura looks heartbroken, but she doesn’t contradict him. “Yeah,” she says sadly. “Maybe it was.”

They fall asleep on Sakura’s bedroom floor, and when they wake up it’s to Sakura’s (shrill and awful) alarm clock.

They go to the hospital together, because Sakura refuses to be left out of talks about Naruto’s illness. Jiraiya is there too when they arrive, waiting for Tsunade to deliver the verdict.

So, surprisingly, is Kakashi.

“Kakashi!” Naruto yells. “Where were you?”

Kakashi eyes him like he’s not delighted to see him. “Out,” he says shortly. “Got back this morning.”

Naruto beams. Naruto is very good at pretending they’re not discussing his deadly illness, but no one else is.

Tsunade runs through it. “There’s very little to go on, because of Naruto’s status as a jinchuuriki,” she starts with. “From what I can tell, the disease is progressing slightly slower than it normally would. He’d survive the surgery with minimal scarring in the lungs, but the longer the disease lingers the worse the scarring gets. Even if this is all dealt with… some other way, the scarring will remain. Or it would, in normal patients. We’re not entirely sure about Naruto.”

They stand in Tsunade’s office and choke on the silence.

 

Jiraiya and Naruto track down Orochimaru, and wipe out most of his base. Orochimaru himself is long gone, and Sasuke isn’t there either. Sasuke doesn’t seem to be anywhere.

They chase ghosts and shadows and monsters, Akatsuki and its sinister puppet-masters, and when all is said and done Naruto is down one arm and the petals in his lungs threaten to choke him every time he breathes.

Sasuke watches him with mismatched eyes. Sakura frets and fusses and when the cavalry arrives, Naruto is laughing around the lumps in his throat and passes out just before they take Sasuke to Torture and Interrogation.

It makes sense that they do. Sasuke is a missing nin, a nightmare, the murderer of several of Konoha’s elders and unwilling to pretend he’s not.

 

Naruto doesn’t want to tell Sasuke he loves him.

It seems stupid now. It seems irrelevant. He’s spent three years of his life chasing the man’s ghost; that he’s in love with Sasuke is obvious. It’s just not that simple.

Sasuke is a traitor and a bastard, and there’s no way he’s going to stay in Konoha. There’s no way he’s not going to leave as soon as he gets the Hokage’s blessing, leave and only return on whims, and never for long.

Naruto doesn’t want to live like that, but more than that he wants to live, so he goes down to the cell he’s being kept in and shoos out the guards, and laughs in Sasuke’s face when his jaw drops.

“I’ve been dying since you left,” he says lightly, far lighter than he feels. His lungs are full, heavy, the nine-tails fighting to help him but only barely able to slow the disease. “Tsuande and Sakura say I don’t have long left.”

Sasuke stares at him with horrified, mismatched eyes. He doesn’t say anything. Naruto leaves.

Tsunade and Sakura all but beg him to get the surgery, but he’s almost content with dying now. The world has been saved. Konoha is in steady hands, and there are enough candidates for future Hokages that he doesn’t have to take the title. He has friends and family and the respect and admiration of the village. It’s bitter and tragic and Naruto wants to do so much more than just this, but he’s never given up on anything and he’s not going to start now.

They let Sasuke out eventually. He stays long enough to let his former team settle in Konoha and offer a single short apology to Sakura.

“You didn’t deserve any of what I put you through. I’m sorry,” he says, bows once, deeply, and then leaves. Sakura watches him go, but finds she can’t think of anything she would have said to that. Ordering Sasuke to be in love with Naruto would never have worked, and it’s the only thing he could have done to begin to atone.

 

“What do you want to do next?” Sasuke asks him. Naruto stares out over Konoha from their perch atop the Hokage monument. “Would you come with me?” he asks.

Naruto turns to look at him. Sasuke is wearing a dark cloak and carrying a pack. No one believed he would stay long. A select few had hoped.

“It could be a death sentence,” Sasuke admits. “I don’t know if I can save you.”

Naruto’s lungs are full of small white petals that he can breathe through a little easier when Sasuke looks at him the way he has these past few days. He loves Sakura and Kakashi as much as he loves Sasuke, and it was pure bad luck that it was Sasuke he fell _in_ love with, and that it was Sasuke who left.

“You sure you won’t stay?” Naruto asks, but no. Sasuke has replaced the nine-tails as the village nightmare. Sasuke can’t stay, not yet.

“I want a family,” Naruto says. A smile touches his face. “Children, you know? Lots of them. The orphan system in Konoha is pretty terrible.” They both know. “I’ve already seen some of the world,” he adds.

“Me too,” Sasuke says. “But I only saw the worst of it.”

Naruto coughs again, and a trickle of petals fall into the abyss beneath him. “You know,” he says conversationally. “Asking me to run away with you means quite a lot, especially because you know I’m in love with you.”

“I know,” Sasuke says, and his voice is hesitant. Unsure. “Maybe I can save you.”

Naruto snorts. “Screw you. I’m not coming with you so you can try and force yourself to fall in love with me.”

Sasuke drops to sit beside him, and holds out his one remaining arm. Naruto stares at him, incredulous, but holds his own hand up to match, and they flick through hand seals together with no particular destination in mind.

“I thought about you every day,” Sasuke tells him. “Come with me. Just for a while.”

 _Just for a while_ is a delusion. If he goes with Sasuke, they’ll be bound together until death.

But then, they already were.

Naruto looks out at Konoha, a village that has enough hatred in it to abuse an orphan, a village that he loves anyway, and turns his back on it.

“Let’s go,” he says, and holds his fist out to Sasuke.

Sasuke knocks it with his own, and they head out into the world.

**Author's Note:**

> additional warnings: discussions of dying, terminal illness, ambiguous ending
> 
> i'm sick of rereading this so here. have angst.


End file.
